Francis Galton and William Bateson on Classical Athens: Eugenics, Genetics, and the Study of Ancient History

Abstract

This article analyses the interpretations of Athenian history offered by Francis Galton and William Bateson. The first section discusses the much-cited assess­ment of the proliferation of eminent men in classical Athens offered by Galton in Hereditary Genius (1869); the less positive use of Greek history in Galton’s 1905 paper ‘Restrictions in Marriage’; and the response to Galton’s eugenics among classicists, particularly in Alfred Zimmern’s 1911 The Greek Common­wealth. The second section draws on previously unused archival material to explore the Mendelian history of Athens offered by Bateson in Australia in one of his 1914 Presidential Addresses to the British Association for the Advance­ment of Science. It shows how he both drew on and departed from advice he had received from classical scholars as he fashioned a response of sorts to the explanation of Athenian genius offered by Galton in Hereditary Genius. It ends by looking at how Bateson’s analysis was received by an ancient historian present at the meeting, J.L. Myres. The article sheds light both on the intel­lectual and institutional contexts in Victorian and Edwardian Britain which made the intermeshing of Biology and Classics possible and on the continuing authority enjoyed by classical antiquity among scientists at this time.